“A lot of it revealed itself as I went along,” the actress told TheWrap. “I was so surprised by how many ways they found for her to survive when she was so cornered. What’s amazing is that she was always on the attack, never on the defensive. She never apologized — she was very masculine in that way.”

Otto also carried out an onscreen affair with Patinkin’s Saul Berenson, one of the longest longest cons her character would pull — though she disagreed it was all for show.

“Any time you have intimacy with someone there is something between them,” she said. “One of the things Alex Gansa gave me was a book on [British spy] Kim Philby. He had these incredibly intimate relationships with all of the people he worked with for years and was double-crossing them.”

“She has this realization that, given the people she’s working for, she can’t afford to be moralistic,” Otto said.

“But when I read that I was dead in a trunk, I said, ‘Couldn’t you open the trunk and I’m not in there?’ Not that she would have to come back to the show, but someone like her would have just evaporated.”